A band that describes themselves as modern rock blues with one hell of an edge, will be swinging through Golden this weekend.

Vancouver’s Head of the Herd, a recent winner of the Fox Seeds contest, will be playing at Taps on Saturday night. Their dark and heavy lyrics are sure to keep the audience enthralled all night.

The band is commemorating the release of their first music video, featuring their single Ain’t My Day.

“The record came from a very honest and natural place,” said half of the duo, Clayton Frank. “When we started we didn’t really have an endgame. We were just writing songs.”

Ain’t My Day was chosen as the first single for one very simple reason. “It’s the one that people leave the show singing. It was a pretty easy decision,” said Neauman Mannas, the other half of Head of the Herd.

The two musicians, one from Calgary and the other from Comox, found each other in Vancouver in a fairly unusual way.

“Our girlfriends were living together at the time,” said Mannas. Those relationships may have ended in somewhat of a disaster, but out of it came a friendship, a harmonious musical partnership, and some powerful lyrics about passion, heartbreak, and devilish women.

Many of their songs, which the two of them write together, are about those very relationships, but there is one song featured on their debut album that was written by the great Johnny Cash.

“It is one of my favourite songs ever written,” said Frank of Cash’s 25 Minutes To Go. The song tells the story of a man on death row with 25 minutes left in his life. It is that kind of storytelling in song that the band strives for in their own music.

“You rarely put yourself in that position,” said Mannas. “It is thrilling to play.” The song has an intense build-up as it counts down the minutes, and finishes off with a harmonica solo that leaves both the band and the audience gasping for air.

A relatively new band, Head of the Herd was featured in the Fox 99.3 Fox Seeds competition in Vancouver. The annual contest, which has seen winners such as Nickleback, Bif Naked and Matt Good, gets hundreds of applicants each year. Head of the Herd went through public voting and professional judging to make the top three.

Now that they have the support of Fox 99.3, they are hitting the road with a five-piece band to celebrate the launch of their first video. And their album, On the House, is just that. You can go to www.headoftheherdmusic.com to download the whole thing for free.

They will be taking the stage at the Golden Taps on Saturday, Oct. 22. The show starts at 10 p.m. and there is no cover charge.